How We Got Married, Part I

On the 19th of this month, we will have been married for 6 months. Yay! Here's how we got married.

We were dating for 7 months when we became engaged. We had known each other for a really long time, so we had already been through the whole "making sure you're not an axe-murderer" phase of the relationship before we became romantic. We knew before we started dating that we were dating in order to figure out if we wanted to get married, which really stream-lined the process. Instead of romantic dinner dates, we ran errands together, cooked meals together, and asked each other frank questions about our plans, habits, when we wanted to have kids and how many, etc. We got engaged in late October of 2010 with a wedding date of February 19, 2011. I'm not sure why we picked that day, except that it was on President's Day weekend and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

If you have ever planned a wedding, you may understand that 4+ months is not a lot of time to do so. It became even less time when:

1. Adam spent 3 weeks recovering after he had an appendectomy one week after we got engaged
2. Thanksgiving happened
3. Adam graduated college
4. Christmas happened
5. A 1 week mission trip to Texas happened at the beginning of January

Us in Texas, blissfully unaware of how hard it is

to plan a wedding

If you have ever planned an event, you may know that in order to send invitations and plan food, flowers, etc., you must first have a location for your event. We had not done any of those things before we went to Texas because we didn't have a place to get married, yet. We scrambled to book the church we wanted the week after we returned from Texas (which, may I bring to your attention, was less than six weeks before the wedding. Professionals recommend you do this six months in advance, which was longer than our entire engagement). Once the church was booked, we had less than six weeks to make everything else work.

We didn't have a place to live, we didn't have furniture, and Adam didn't have work, but we really felt like this was the right thing to and that we needed to have faith to pull it off. 

So we started praying.

Within two weeks, we had an apartment and furniture (furniture courtesy of my dad). We asked people to be in the wedding a month out, which is also when we sent the invitations (breaking about 50 rules of proper wedding preparation tactics).

I'll tell you what we did for rings, flowers, tuxes, dresses, and the church in another post. Our goal was to start our lives together not-broke. We had generous contributions from all sides of the family, and our wedding was more beautiful than we imagined, but we were still able to be frugal and trim a lot of the excess from our wedding. The average wedding in the US costs $25,000. (I'll give you a hint: ours was way less than that.)

Adam's mom bought the flowers, and she arranged them an hour before the wedding.

I've never witnessed such a flurry of activity in my life.

We still didn't have work for Adam, but what we did have was a whole bunch of friends and family who took wonderful care of us all along the way.

You know that feeling you have when you

see a video of an old woman making it

across the tracks one second before

the train blasts through? That what this felt like,

only I was the old woman, and the wedding 

was the train.

Adam was finally hired three months after we were married. (What we do and don't do for employment is a subject for another post.) We have been blessed beyond measure, and we have agreed that if our relationship can survive the wedding planning, it can survive anything.

I leave you with this quote from Proverbs 16:3:

"Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established."